[swift-dev] Cleaning up stale branches?

[John McCall]

> On Oct 21, 2016, at 1:54 PM, Dave Abrahams <dabrahams at apple.com> wrote:
> on Fri Oct 21 2016, John McCall <rjmccall-AT-apple.com> wrote:
> 
>>> On Oct 21, 2016, at 12:23 PM, Daniel Dunbar <daniel_dunbar at apple.com> wrote:
>>>> On Oct 21, 2016, at 12:14 PM, Dave Abrahams via swift-dev <swift-dev at swift.org
>> <mailto:swift-dev at swift.org>> wrote:
>>>> 
>>>> 
>>>> on Fri Oct 21 2016, John McCall <rjmccall-AT-apple.com <http://rjmccall-at-apple.com/>> wrote:
>> 
>>>> 
>>>>>> On Oct 21, 2016, at 10:39 AM, Dave Abrahams via swift-dev <swift-dev at swift.org <mailto:swift-dev at swift.org>> wrote:
>>>>>> on Fri Oct 21 2016, Daniel Dunbar <swift-dev-AT-swift.org <http://swift-dev-at-swift.org/>> wrote:
>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> While on this topic...
>>>>>>> 
>>>>> 
>>>>>>> GitHub's support for doing cross-repo pull requests is
>>>>>>> excellent. Anyone can easily fork the main repo, and push to their
>>>>>>> side repo (for example, with: `git push ddunbar
>>>>>>> HEAD:name-of-my-new-branch`) and the GitHub web UI on the main repo
>>>>>>> will automatically show you a handy button for creating the PR.
>>>>>>> 
>>>>>>> With this level of support, IMHO branches usually should be pushed to
>>>>>>> individual's own repos, not the main repo.
>>>>>> 
>>>>>> IMO it depends whether you think Swift development should be
>>>>>> discoverable.  When the Swift project formally engages in developing
>>>>>> something like the new integer and floating point models, there's an
>>>>>> advantage to having it in the main repository.
>>>>> 
>>>>> I don't understand this argument.  Looking at a list of branches is not a useful
>>>>> way of discovering development history — you don't know which branches are
>>>>> still active, which branches were merged, or which branches were completely
>>>>> abandoned.  
>>>> 
>>>> True.  Maybe discoverability isn't the word I was looking for.  When
>>>> three people want to collaborate on development of a feature branch,
>>>> where should it live?
>>> 
>>> I agree... longer lived high profile branches make sense to me personally, just not short lived
>> "push for purpose of PRing immediately" ones.
>> 
>> Yeah, I agree.  Any sort of *collaborative* branch is 100% okay to
>> live in the main repository.  If you weren't expecting a branch to be
>> a collaboration and it starts turning into one, it's easy to just move
>> it over from your personal fork at that point.
> 
> FWIW, if you visit https://github.com/apple/swift/branches you'll see
> all your branches at the top, and you can delete (at least) any that
> have already been merged.

The PR page also prompts you to do this after the merge succeeds.

John.